Adsense is dead podcast
September 27, 2006
If you have a life outside of internet marketing, you probably haven’t been paying attention to the whole is Adsense alive or dead argument.
I just finished listening to a podcast with John Jonas.
I enjoyed listening to what he said even if I felt a little depressed by trying to make to make some nice, pretty sites with Adsense to try and make a little cash.
Technorati Tags: Adsense dead
More domain buying
September 25, 2006
Even though I eased up a little buying new domains recently, I had a few new ideas over the weekend, which resulted in a small domain buying spree.
I sometimes wonder if I am doing the right thing or not. I heard a good story of a guy who thought domains were a good investment and started buying a lot of domains. His wife complained to him what was he doing spending all of this money on buying internet domains.
He got his first return when someone bought a domain for $5000. His wife then said to him, “what are you doing going to bed - go and find some more domains to buy!”
I believe I have fairly good instincts when it comes to making investments. Not everything I have done has turned to gold, but my gains are currently outweighing past losses I have made.
Tokyo Game Show
September 25, 2006
Not that I am into video games very much, I thought it would be interesting to take a look.
Here is a video I took of the event.
Tokyo Game Show
Technorati Tags: Tokyo Game Show
Meeting up with a reader of my blog
September 22, 2006
The President of DMC Japan, Guy Harris, today invited me to a lunch at the ACCJ where Scott Neville, the Vice President, Global Services, of ValueCommerce gave a presentation on affiliate marketing in Japan.
I have met up with a couple of people before that read my blog, but today was the first time for a while. It is funny in some ways meeting up with someone who only knows about you through your blog. Guy has been in Japan for 18 years and has been running his own business since 1995.
Since I started myself with affiliate marketing, it was the first time to watch someone give a live presentation about it. The ACCJ is made up of mostly non-technical business people, so I think that Scott did a very good job of explaining how his company can help businesses with their sales and marketing.
I would love to do more Japanese sites, but since I cannot write native Japanese, it is much more time consuming and expensive to get sites set up. The rewards I believe however could be fantastic.
Consumer lending is rapidly becoming big business in Japan, where lending companies operate without the controls that are in place in most western countries. Scott said some companies where paying around $300-400 a referral.
We are going to meet up some time for a beer again soon, so if there is anyone in Tokyo who might be interested in joining us, please drop me a mail.
How to retire young and weatlhy
September 20, 2006
Here is my entry for Problogger’s “How to” competition, hopefull I am not too late.
How to retire young and wealthy:
I started my blog with this title nearly two years ago. Although, I am not quite there yet, I am fairly well done the path from where I was two years ago. Here are some of the principles I follow and have done pretty well for me:
- Save a part of your income every month. It sounds obvious, but often people kid themselves that by not buying cafe lattes everyday they will have this surplus income every month. Commit to a certain amount of money and put it away where you cannot touch it, at the start of every month.
- Invest your savings in quality investments that cannot easily converted back to cash. Personally I have done well investing in property - steady income, nice capital gains.
- Create multiple sources of passive income. With a little bit of effort, this can be done while you are still working, so you are not totally reliant on investment income. Ebooks, affiliate income and Adsense are all good potential sources.
- Only use a credit card to pay for web hosting and emergency purchases. Wait at least a week before buying any new gadget to think over if you actually need the item.
- Live a relatively frugal life, but don’t skimp on self-education, hobbies, books, socializing with people with similar goals and travel!
New pligg site on Japan
September 19, 2006
I have installed pligg on a domain I purchased last year. Pligg is based on the popular news sharing site - digg.com.
There aren’t too many templates for it yet, but if it takes off, it could easily be an alternative blogging platform to Wordpress.
You can see it here. It was fairly easy to install and there is a fairly active forum if you have any issues.
What I am reading:
Pligg
Technorati Tags: Pligg
Making money with free job and classified sites
September 18, 2006
There are so many big, free classified sites available now, like craig’s list, you kind of wonder if it is worth creating a new site. That was my though last year when I started dotjapan.com a free job classified site for English speakers in Japan.
The site now has over a hundred jobs and is fairly well indexed by google. My main source of revenue is Adsense and selling links through linkworth.
Last year I noticed a few companies posting “mystery shoppers” and “data entry jobs”. I was happy just for people to be posting new jobs, so I didn’t worry too much about the kind of jobs they were. I later found that these so called “jobs” were just links to affiliate programs, where people paid to get information on the job.
I immediately deleted all of the ads and added my own ads, mostly to Clickbank products. I suppose it is a little sneaky, but I am sure that you could make some good money by making a data entry/mystery shopping site and making posts on free job classified sites.
How to become a billionaire by 30
September 15, 2006
Japan’s most popular social networking site Mixi has just listed on the Tokyo stock exchange.
Its founder Kenji Kasahara owns 64 per cent of the stock. The company is currently valued at $1.6 billion dollars. It makes NewsCorp seem like they picked up MySpace for a bargain at $580 million.
Kasahara saw how popular MySpace was in the US, and decided to create a Japanese version.
Currently there is no real equivalent of YouTube in Japan, which is a space just waiting to be filled.
Domain consolidation
September 15, 2006
Definitely one thing on my to-do-list is to transfer all of my domains to one register. I suggest finding a good, reliable register and stick with them. When I first starting out and creating a new site, I registered the domain with the company I was hosting the site with.
I now have a few domains at different registers and I think it would definitely be more manageable if I was just using the one. Different hosting companies can have some benefits, like SEO, downtime and so on.
I am now transferring my first one and it can take around 5-7 days to complete.
Sometimes I get so easily side tracked
September 14, 2006
Yesterday Duncan posted a link to a new open source Digg style CMS called Pligg.
I couldn’t help giving it a try. I got it installed on a domain, but the default template is pretty average.
I have a good idea for a site, but I wonder if I will have the time to do it. I love these open source projects. Yesterday I also made an online survey for my new site. It is pretty basic, but it was good learning the Joomla facile forms component.
